Transcultural Encounters: De- and Re-humanisation of the Worker in Multinational “Luxembourgish” Poetry, 1900-1940

This article contrasts the portrayal of the worker and his/her labour in French- and German-speaking book-poetry addressed to the Luxembourgish intelligentsia to the newspaper-poems consumed by the working-class readers of the social democratic organ Der Arme Teufel (1903-1929). It posits and illustrates that the attribution and simultaneous withdrawal of identity to the workers by bourgeois writers implies their incapacitation and disempowerment not only in financial terms, but also on a philosophico-literary level. In order to counteract the inscription of inferiority into cultural and literary history through aesthetic objectification, it seeks to reconstruct and include the workers’ perspective by shedding light on their transcultural consumption practices. Readers of Der Arme Teufel were presented with a wide selection of high-brow and amateur poetry from a multinational background, frequently, if not always, supporting the socialist cause. Analysing a selection of poems that depict the workers’ position in and their attitudes towards the factory system, this article proposes to widen the national literary canon to include the transcultural newspaper poetry consumed in Luxembourg in order to incorporate the multiplicity of literary expressions that formulated and shaped public consciousness.